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Howdy Friends,

We've brought forward the new Design Cloud and templating changes (originally planned for the update after next) and significantly improved aspects of the builder interface. Let's chat about it, shall we?

Design Cloud

No matter how you think of templating, it is a key part to the site building journey. Currently, it's a bit of a challenge to manage the different template types in the different builders, and our goal is to improve that...significantly.

We have a very exciting vision for Design Cloud, and it starts with being the one place you manage all templating. From individual buttons to complete sites — Design Cloud will be both a local design library plus a powerful engine for creating and sharing all your design assets.

To accomplish this, we are completely retooling the templating paradigm. Presets will now be Templates, and there will be four key template types.

• Layout Templates - This includes Headers, Footers, Blogs, & Shops.
• Page Templates - Think page content.
• Section Templates - Individual piece(s) of a larger page.
• Element Templates - The smallest building block like an individual button style.

All together, these pieces make up what ultimately becomes your website. And before you think that everyone will need to start "templatizing" everything (you won't), the main takeaway is that we want a consistent way to improve both the portability of your assets, the experience for how they are managed, and introduce templating into the site building process (both to save assets but to also use templates to deconstruct for new sections, pages, etc).

Interface Improvements

Unfortunately we're not quite ready to share a sneak peek yet, but this has been a significant focus in the past month. If you ever feel like you get lost switching between different contexts in Cornerstone — all of that is about to change with a new and improved header design.

Much of it will feel very familiar to you (especially you 1.0 Cornerstone folks), and with it we are introducing an exciting new snapping...or I guess I should say unsnapping feature. Each of the main icons in the top of the workspace will be drag-able to the left or right side of your screen.

Want to have the Outline tab open while you inspect an Element? Now you can. Want to see available templates based on the builder? You can do that too. The new header design will also allow you to see important contextual information like the title of the page you're working on plus several other helpful odds and ends.

We are going to have to sunset the Horizontal Mode in the builder to bring about this unsnapping, however when we asked some of our power users whether they use it or not...many didn't even know it was there. 😂😂

Other Quick Updates

Two other quick changes we've made. If you change the opacity of an assigned Global Color, it will keep referencing that Global Color (see video). Fonts are also being reworked to allow any font on any Element without having to commit to setting up a font item first!

We also greatly appreciate your flexibility as we bring forward these important changes and get them into the current cycle. A massive thank-you to our faithful and patient beta testers as we know this cycle is longer than most. Be on the lookout this month for more updates and sneak peeks along the way.

All my best,
Kyle